Revision as of 22:24, 15 January 2008

Introduction

Here is a script that will convert FLAC to MP3 via the commandline.

Essentially, the .flac files within a directory will be decompressed to .wav and then the resulting .wav files will be encoded to .mp3 using the latest LAME switches for encodings (-V 0 --vbr-new). The ID3 tags of the original .flac files will be passed to the resulting .mp3 files.

The original .flac files will not be harmed and the resulting .mp3s will be in the same directory. All other files in the directory (.nfo, images, .sfv, etc) will be ignored and unharmed.

For more information on LAME switches/settings such as V0, visit Hydrogenaudio LAME Wiki. V0 is roughly equivalent to --preset extreme which results in a variable bitrate usually between 220-260. The audio of a V0 is transparent, meaning one cannot tell the difference between the lossy file and the original source (compact disc/lossless), but yet the file size is a quite reasonable.